In 1978, Liberty Fund published nineteenth-century intellectual
giant Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics in two volumes, with
an introduction by Tibor R. Machan. Spencer's magnificent tome is
full of wisdom and will be read with profit for generations.
Machan's brief introduction is more questionable. Calling it
"Herbert Spencer: A Century Later," Machan begins with some
biographical details. Then, instead of proceeding to inform us about
Spencer's views and his reasons for holding them, he immediately
starts to criticize them. In the course of doing so, he objects to
Spencer's rejection of the doctrine of free will, his advocacy of
altruism, his endorsement of utilitarianism, and his evolutionary
ethics. Machan's objections, however, are wrong or misplaced in all
four cases.

Machan was much younger in 1978 and has subsequently written a
great deal for publication. Perhaps in his later writings he has
renounced some of his criticisms of Spencer, but whether he has done so
does not matter here. What Machan published then remains in print now
and should not stand unchallenged. Respect for fairness and regard for
historical accuracy require a due appreciation of why Spencer held the
views that Machan deems wrong-headed. Furthermore, although the issues
Machan raises are ancient, they are still very much alive; and the
mistakes he makes have been made previously and will be made again,
especially if they go uncorrected. Therefore, showing precisely where
Machan went wrong will not be an exercise in raking dead coals.

Free Will versus Freedom

Machan's first complaint is that Spencer accepted a
"determinism of the sort that excludes the very possibility of
genuine human choices" (Machan 1978, 13). In Machan's opinion,
Spencer thereby created "a distorted idea of human freedom"
that renders meaningless "the ideal of political and economic
liberty" to which Spencer also subscribed (17). Except to say that
you cannot make free choices if you cannot make choices, Machan does not
develop this criticism; he merely asserts it, as if its truth were
self-evident. For him, free will is an axiom and essential to liberty,
so Spencer is wrong to deny it.

The truth is more complicated. According to the philosophical
doctrine that Spencer rejected when he accepted the "law of
universal causation," men have free will not merely in the sense
that they make choices, as Machan so casually puts it, but also in the
more pregnant sense that nothing causes them to make these choices,
including in particular their own desires. In other words, free-will
choices are made ab initio, without causal antecedents. As Roderick
Chisholm, who accepted this idea, used to explain it, what philosophers
call freedom of will is the power of a "prime mover unmoved"
(1989, 12), a godlike ability to make choices that have no explanations
because they have no prior determinants. (l)

This obscure idea was inspired by the ancient Greek poet and
philosopher Plato, who defined free choice as the action of a Will
guided not by base bodily Desire, but by Reason, a more noble faculty of
mind. According to Plato, a man who does something because he wants to
do it is a slave to his passions--a metaphor that Plato appears to have
taken quite literally, to the eternal detriment of the topic. In a
colossal non sequitur, Plato concluded that freedom belongs only to the
man who does something for no other reason than that he knows it to be
right. In other words, freedom is transcendence of desire for the sake
of duty. The Stoics, St. Augustine, and Immanuel Kant--the most
influential ancient, medieval, and modern expositors of the doctrine of
free will--all followed Plato in holding that being free means doing not
what one desires, but what God commands.

Spencer, a scientific man without known religious commitment,
wanted to understand why people make the choices they make. In his
carefully considered view, the metaphysical idea of a transcendent will
was not scientific, but mystical--in other words, unintelligible--and
the political idea of freedom as obedience was not sensible, but
oxymoronic. Therefore, he rejected both ideas. Spencer, however, would
have been astonished to be told that he had thereby denied the reality
of the choices that he wanted to explain. He would also have regarded as
absurd the proposition that his embrace of scientific determinism
undermined the personal freedom he wanted to foster.

Furthermore, he would have been entirely right in these reactions.
As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner used to urge, to define
freedom as choice-without-cause is to represent it as a
miracle--something that, in the nature of the case, cannot be
comprehended. In simple language, it is to proclaim that we can never
understand why anybody chooses to do one thing rather than another.
Spencer knew that if anything is essential to a scientific mind, it is
the presumption that something can be understood by reference to its
causes, which we may hope to discover by empirical means. Belief in
godlike powers to act in ways that are wholly independent of the natural
order is therefore not science; it is mysticism.

It is no answer to say that because human beings are goal-seeking
animals, explanations of their behavior have to be teleological rather
than mechanistic. The premise is true, but the conclusion posits a false
dichotomy. Purposive behavior is not an exception to the law of
universal causation; it is a special case of it. As Skinner also showed,
"operant [that is, voluntary] behavior" is distinguished from
"respondent [that is, reflex] behavior" by being subject to
the law of effect--the principle that a form of conduct is conditioned
by its consequences. In other words, you are more likely to choose to do
again what had the desired result in the past. Knowing this fact enables
us to understand why people choose to do what they expect to be
pleasurable and to avoid what they expect to be painful. Can anyone
really believe that anything is explained by positing a power of choice
not covered by this law?

There are, of course, good reasons to doubt the truth of the minute
determinism that prevailed in the nineteenth century when Spencer wrote.
Since the advent of quantum physics, the development of methods of
statistical analysis, and the formulation of sophisticated theories of
probability, acceptance of irresolvable indeterminacy, or chance, has
become an ineradicable feature of respectable science. This fact has,
however, no implications whatsoever for the present issue. It is
certainly not a reason to believe in a transcendent will. That sometimes
"the atoms swerve," as Epicurus held, does not mean that men
are ever "prime movers unmoved." Indeterminacy is not a proof
of miracles.

Fortunately, belief in miracles is not essential to personal
freedom, which is neither metaphysical nor theological, but social. As
Thomas Hobbes made amply clear in the seventeenth century and David Hume
reiterated with even greater clarity in the eighteenth, what is needed
for liberty is not absence of causation by circumstances, but absence of
restraint and coercion by other persons. Consider a common example.
Imagine that I give a bandit my money because he is holding a gun to my
head. I then have acted under coercion, and what I do is not done of my
own free will. (2) Now imagine, by way of comparison, that I eat my
breakfast because I am hungry. I do so not as a result of coercion, but
of my own free will, without any diminution of personal liberty--a
completely different situation.

The two situations are admittedly alike in one respect: In each
case a choice is made, and in each case there is a cause for the choice.
There is, however, loss of liberty because there is coercion only in the
first case, when there is a gun to my head. In the second case, where I
eat because I am hungry, I do what I do of my own free will because I
act without coercion even though I do so in satisfaction of my desire
for food. As Simone de Beauvoir famously remarked in commentary on
free-will apostle Jean Paul Sartre, being free does not require that you
cease to wish for things. It requires only that you not be compelled by
threats to do what somebody else wishes.

Spencer understood this distinction perfectly, and he stated it
clearly in another work: "When [a man] is under the impersonal
coercion of Nature, we say that he is free; and when he is under the
personal coercion of someone above him, we call him, according to the
degree of his dependence, a slave, a serf or a vassal" (1981, 493).
Although Spencer in this passage used the term coercion as a synonym for
causation, he was not misled by this usage. In contrast, Machan blurs
the concept of liberty when he blurs the distinction between
"coercion by Nature" and "coercion by persons."

The irony is that the real threat to liberty is not Spencer's
scientific determinism, but Plato's obfuscating assertion of
metaphysical transcendence. As is abundantly clear in the treatise that
Plato's medieval translators misnamed The Republic, Plato had no
use for real liberty. His chief complaint against democracy, which he
opposed at every turn, was that it promoted "unbridled"
personal freedom. Disliking the messy results, he wanted a polity in
which common folk would do not what they wanted to do, but what their
betters--people such as Plato--believed they should do. This
aristocracy, as Plato called it, was to be ruled neither by the public
at large nor by leaders they chose, but by a coterie of self-anointed
philosopher kings.

Ruling on the basis of "reason" rather than
"passion," these philosophers would unchain their subjects
from the "slavery" of doing what they wanted so they could
benefit from the "freedom" of obeying their superiors instead.
Thus did Plato propose to put the concept of free will in the service of
authoritarian rule. St. Augustine, the most influential writer of early
Christianity, followed Plato in this preference for authority, except
that he wanted his authorities to be priests and pontiffs--again, people
such as himself (see Hocutt 2003). (3) When Spencer declined to believe
in the reality of a "free" will, he was not undermining
liberty; he was rejecting one of the principal ideas of its enemies.

Among these enemies, as Machan surely knows, was Immanuel Kant, who
is often mistaken for a friend. Following Augustine, the Lutheran Kant
understood free will to mean doing one's God-given duty, not
satisfying one's personal desires. That this idea entails the very
opposite of personal freedom might, however, be guessed from Kant's
enthusiasm for the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who dreamed of a
political order in which there would be "no loss of freedom"
in obeying the authorities of a government that, having total control
over persons and property, would make it a policy to enact not the
wishes of the citizenry, but "the general will," which only
the rulers would be privileged to know. Seeing through this double talk,
the astute Bertrand Russell (1945) once called Rousseau the founder of
totalitarianism. (4) In a recent book, Stephen Hicks (2004) shows how
Rousseau's ideas led through Kant and Hegel to Nazism and
communism. (5)

Free will (absence of causation) is one thing; liberty (absence of
coercion) is another. (6) It is a mistake--a dangerous mistake--to
conflate one with the other.

Egoism versus Selfishness

Machan's second objection is that Spencer lapsed from
libertarian faith in egoism when in his later years he averred that
self-sacrificial altruism could be not only a virtue, but even a moral
obligation. To Machan--a disciple of Ayn Rand, who notoriously touted
"the virtue of selfishness" and urged the inviolable sanctity
of the purely self-regarding individual--Spencer's endorsement of
altruism seems to be a lapse into the worst sort of political and moral
heresy and a giant step in the direction of socialist dictatorship.
Unfortunately, in his haste to reject this hated heresy, Machan ignores
Spencer's careful reasoning on the matter. He merely notes that
Spencer ended up reaching a conclusion that does not comport with
Machan's concept of individualism--a shortcut through a great text,
to say the least.

Like Rand, who excoriated self-sacrifice as contrary to nature,
Machan regards Spencer's embrace of altruism as an unforgivable
sin. As we shall see shortly, however, it is Machan who has committed
the error--by confusing personal goals, or goals belonging to the agent,
with selfish goals, or goals aimed at the agent's benefit. This
confusion makes Spencer's endorsement of other-regarding conduct
appear to have constituted an abandonment of egoist, or individualist,
belief in pursuing one's own ends.

It did not. Spencer remained throughout a thoroughgoing egoist in
recognizing that a goal must be internalized if it is to motivate a
rational individual's conduct. If the goal is to move someone, it
must become his. To say so is to utter a truism, but this truism ought
not to be confused with the different, if similar-sounding, proposition
that the only allowable goal is the agent's own welfare. That
conclusion identifies the goal's possessor with its beneficiary.
Like Rand, Machan is presuming that they are one and the same person.

This presumption is false. An agent's goal may be as other
regarding as you please without in any way diminishing the rationality
of his conduct. If I value my grandchildren's education---or yours
or a complete stranger's--more than I value having an expensive
car, then it is rational for me to act accordingly. Never mind that my
conduct will be unselfish, aimed at benefiting others. Never mind, even,
that it will involve sacrifice of something that would benefit me. So
long as it serves my purposes, it will be rational. Rational egoism is
not synonymous with selfishness. Of course, the two are sometimes
defined in such a way as to be synonyms, as are the words altruism and
unselfishness, but such stipulations only beg questions; they do not
settle them. Besides, in strict parlance, the Latin terms denote
doctrines, whereas the English words refer to behavior. (7)

Why, then, have so many smart people, including Machan, come to
believe in the identity of reason and selfishness? Part of the answer
may be a failure to clarify the tricky relation between hedonism and
egoism, or pleasure and reason. Hedonism is the thesis that anticipation
of pleasure and avoidance of pain are the sole motives for rational
conduct. Whose pleasure? Whose pain? The egoist says, "That of the
agent." If he is right, no rational person voluntarily chooses to
do what he expects to cause him more pain than pleasure or to yield him
less pleasure than the alternative course of action. We take actions
because they promise to make us happier. In the useful jargon of
Skinnerian behaviorists, these actions are reinforcing. That is the
paramount fact about human psychology.

Superficial thinkers have concluded that if nay goal is my own
pleasure or happiness, then my conduct must be not altruistic, but
self-regarding. By means of this line of reasoning, they have made all
conduct seem selfish by definition. But the fallacy in this line of
thought--that to be motivated by pleasure is to have it as one's
goal--was exposed in detail in the eighteenth century in Bishop Joseph
Butler's brilliant Sermons on Self-Love. As Butler made clear, one
does not achieve happiness by aiming at it; it comes about only as a
by-product of what one does aim at.

Furthermore, declaring behavior selfish because it is motivated by
a preference for doing what pleases is like declaring that a cat is a
dog because it has four legs: such reasoning mistakes the incidental for
the essential fact. As Adam Smith's wise friend David Hume pointed
out, the paradigm of an unselfish man is one who gets pleasure out of
doing what benefits others. The selfish man, in contrast, gets pleasure
only out of what benefits himself.

Careless use of the treacherous term self-interest also fosters
conflation of rationality and selfishness. Both Rand and Machan insist
that self-interest is the only rational basis for behavior. Although
this claim is indubitably true if taken in one way, it is plainly false
if taken in another. What is meant by self-interests? Personal interests
or selfish interests? Egoism is the thesis that it is rational to do
what promises to advance, irrational to do what promises to defeat,
one's personal interests--meaning the interests that one personally
has. It follows that doing what advances other people's interests
is rational only if their interests happen to coincide with, or come
under, one's own. That proposition is the essential truth of
rational egoism. (8)

From this truth, one cannot deduce that behaving rationally means
being unerringly selfish. Furthermore, that monstrous claim is false. It
would be true if people had nothing but selfish interests, but most of
us care about the welfare of at least something or somebody besides
ourselves. We love our families, our friends, our neighbors, and our
country--as well as our pets, our sports, our hobbies, our social clubs,
our lands, and our creations. Therefore, their interests are among our
interests. Few people, if any, have exclusively selfish interests, and
some people may even be wildly altruistic. Regard for others may be
one's consuming passion. If so, it is rational to behave
accordingly, as Spencer knew. If we may take Machan at his word, he does
not know; neither, apparently, did Rand.

That Spencer was on firmer ground can be shown by considering the
standard objection to egoism. Spencer's
"progressive'-minded contemporary Henry Sidgwick first stated
this objection more than a century ago in his influential Methods of
Ethics. (9) Since then, scores of critics have repeated it. These
critics say that the egoist occupies the incoherent position of
declaring behavior that is patently immoral to be morally obligatory. In
their view, morality implies regard for others by definition; so, to
advocate disregard of others is to maintain that one's only moral
duty is to behave immorally, which is self-refuting.

Instead of denying this canard, Rand and Machan embrace it and try
to neutralize it by inverting the meaning of the word moral, declaring
in effect, "Yes, by our definition, selfish, and only selfish,
behavior is moral." But this brazen Humpty-Dumptyism cannot alter
the fact that selfish disregard of others is indubitably immoral in the
workaday sense of the word. More than one philosopher has pointed out
that the main point and purpose of morality, as of law and etiquette, is
to encourage people to act in consideration of the welfare, interests,
and wishes of others. (10) Arbitrary redefinition of the word moral can
obscure that fact, but it can no more alter it than defining a dog as a
five-legged animal can give a dog an extra leg (to paraphrase Abe
Lincoln).

There is a better answer to the critics: just issue a reminder that
egoism is an account not of morality, but of rationality, and that it
equates the latter with the pursuit not of selfish ends, but of personal
ends, which may be either selfish or unselfish. Whether the resulting
behavior is moral or immoral raises an entirely separate question, which
the egoist as such does not consider. Of course, saying that it is
rational for X to do Y means that X ought to do Y, but the ought here is
the ought of reason, not that of morality. There is no solecism in
declaring, "If the bandit wants to rob banks, he ought to carry a
gun; but for him to rob banks would be immoral."

In summary, behaving rationally does not mean doing only what
promises to advance one's selfish interests. It means doing what
promises to advance one's personal interests, which may be selfish
or unselfish. Therefore, one can be both rational and unselfish; one can
even be both rational and self-sacrificing. St. Francis and Mother
Teresa were extraordinary people, but they were not lunatics.

Utilitarianism versus Egoism

Machan's third mistake is a compound of his first two with an
added ingredient, confusion about utilitarianism. Spencer described
himself as a utilitarian, but he called his doctrine rational
utilitarianism to distinguish it from Bentham and Mill's empirical
utilitarianism. (11) Despite having mentioned this fact, Machan offers
nothing--not even a sentence--by way of explaining it. Instead, he
proceeds without pause to condemn Spencer's utilitarianism along
with Bentham's on the grounds that utilitarians of all stripes
advocate altruism, which Machan, following Rand, regards as the depth of
wickedness.

I confess that this attitude leaves me nonplussed. Can any person
really think that he or she would prefer a world of psychopaths
indifferent to the welfare of others? Machan virtually says so, but the
saying is hard to credit. Annoying as meddlesome do-gooders are, even
they are preferable to people intent on doing harm to others or acting
in blithe disregard of others' wishes and well-being. As to Rand,
one hopes that she never literally meant her declaration of "the
virtue of selfishness." I prefer to think that her provocative
slogan was a calculated indulgence in rhetorical excess or, less
excusably, a product of careless disregard for the precise meanings of
words. Taken as it stands, without qualification and explanation, it is
too paradoxical to merit serious discussion. (12)

Be that as it may, the altruism Spencer praises was of a kind that,
he believed, an ethical individual would be motivated to practice
willingly, without compulsion by others. In Spencer's ideal
world--the one to be achieved after desirable moral and political
evolution--the truly ethical person will be unselfish and even generous
because he wants to be, and that fact makes all the difference. (13)
From beginning to end, however, Spencer opposed the kind of
"altruism" that is forced on citizens by governments bent on
redistributing wealth from those who have earned it or saved it to those
who have not. He considered this practice a violation of the fundamental
principle of natural justice. (14) He therefore viewed robbing some to
give to others as a criminal shakedown. (15)

Spencer understood, however, that ruling out externally enforced
altruism need not eliminate voluntary charity, which he strongly
favored. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie's tremendous philanthropic
efforts were inspired by Spencer's thoughts on this matter. Having
made one of the biggest fortunes ever attained, Carnegie proceeded to
try to give it all away. He wanted to die broke, having helped his
fellow men. Despite Spencer's true views and their actual
consequences, as illustrated by Carnegie's mammoth generosity,
socialists have used tendentious misreadings of the phrase
"survival of the fittest," which Spencer invented, to accuse
him of promoting "dog eat dog" competition through
laissez-faire capitalism, which he rightly believed would do more to
promote the welfare of the poor than any alternative economic system.

As for rational egoism, Spencer saw that it leaves room for love,
friendship, fellow feeling, patriotism, a humane desire for the welfare
of strangers, concern for the survival of mankind, a passion for the
preservation of nature, and so on. Like Bentham, who also advocated
altruism, Spencer realized that a world in which we care for something
or somebody besides ourselves is better for all of us than the
alternative would be; and a world in which we help to make other people
happy will be one in which we ourselves are more likely to be happy,
too. In short, he saw that regard for others has tangible and obvious
benefits.

That said, it must be acknowledged that Machan is right about one
thing: Spencer did not endorse Bentham's altruistic hedonism,
according to which the pleasures of others are to be reckoned equal to
one's own, whether one desires them equally or not. Again, though,
Machan neglects to explain this important point or to say how it
matters, but the answer is easy to come by. As Spencer says in the first
volume of The Principles of Ethics, he disagreed with the
hedonist's belief that one should aim at maximizing pleasure.
Instead, he said, one should aim at doing justice in the expectation
that the result will maximize pleasure, or happiness, more effectively.

Happiness, as Bishop Butler had argued, comes as an epiphenomenon of success in achieving more substantial goals; it cannot be aimed at
directly. Why not? Because, in the language of the scholastics,
happiness is not a substance but an accident. That is to say, it is not
a thing, but an incident of things or activities. So one can no more aim
at happiness than one can aim at a nonexisting target; one can aim only
at what has happiness as a by-product. Likewise for pleasure. One does
not enjoy the pleasure of eating ice cream; one enjoys (that is, finds
pleasurable the act of) eating ice cream. Pleasure, despite its frequent
nominalization, is not substantival, but adjectival and adverbial. Thus,
all forms of hedonism, whether egoistic or altruistic, rest on a
category mistake--in this case, the error of assigning to one
grammatical category what properly belongs to another.

This point may seem trivial, but it gave Spencer a ready answer to
a standard criticism of Bentham--namely, that according to
utilitarianism, punishing an innocent man would be right if it set a
beneficial example. Spencer holds that such unjust practices would soon
have an effect contrary to the one intended: they would defeat their
purpose by producing more misery than happiness, and they would corrupt
those who engaged in them. Spencer accordingly preferred what has come
to be called rule utilitarianism rather than act utilitarianism: make
rules on the basis of utility, then act on the basis of the rules. If
the rules don't work, don't flout them; change them. It was
good advice. (16)

Evolutionary versus a Priori Ethics

Finally, let us consider Machan's objection to Spencer's
evolutionary ethics. Spencer recognized that some highly general forms
of conduct--for example, reciprocity, the care of children, and loyalty
to one's group--are rooted in human nature, which is much the same
everywhere. He thought, however, that the specific content of a
society's rules--whether to allow polygamy, for example--should and
normally would be adapted to circumstances. He accordingly embraced a
kind of moral relativism and declared that the rules needed in advanced
societies in favorable circumstances might make little sense among ruder
people under more primitive conditions. The truth of this observation
seems especially obvious when (1) the morality of sharing in community
possessions and the patriarchal rule that were standard in the family
groups that composed the first human societies is compared with (2) the
morality of private-property rights and impersonal law required in the
complex civilizations in which most people now live. (17)

Spencer believed that doctrinaire politics and a priori moral
theory are largely useless, if not positively harmful. Although he
readily acknowledged the reality of a biologically based human nature,
he saw that it is not fixed forever, but is subject to evolution under
the press of social and environmental change. Furthermore, he realized
that if a society's institutions are to work, they must be adapted
to the situation, usually by a process of trial and error over a long
period, perhaps generations. (18) In short, he saw that evolution, both
biological and social, is always in progress.

In The Principles of Ethics, Spencer went to great lengths to
justify this thesis, writing chapter after chapter on the reasons for
variations in social customs. The whole purpose of this elaborate and
learned exercise was to show how a society's situation gives rise
to its practices and causes them to be modified or abandoned. In taking
this line, Spencer initiated salutary developments in the newly emerging
sciences of sociology and anthropology. William Graham Sumner,
nineteenth-century America's leading social scientist and the
author of an influential volume entitled Folkways, was an unqualified
admirer.

Spencer wisely never went the way of the disciples of influential
twentieth-century anthropologist Franz Boas, the teacher of Margaret
Mead and Ruth Benedict, who maintained that because one society's
morality is as good as that of another when judged by its own standards,
criticism of a society's practices by outsiders is meaningless.
This view entails denying the possibility of improving local practices
by applying standards that are applicable everywhere. It is currently
the basis of the orthodoxy its proponents call multiculturalism and its
opponents call political correctness.

Although this doctrine is dogma in some parts of the contemporary
university-especially in some of the humanities and social sciences--it
is ultimately untenable (Hocutt 2004, 2005a). What people make, they
make well or ill. So if moralities are made, they can, like laws, be
made well or poorly. Grant, then, that condemning a society's
morality as immoral or its law as illegal makes no sense if there is no
higher Morality or Law to use as a standard. Ruling out that sort of
self-nullifying assessment does not rule out evaluation of a
society's morality or law as productive or destructive of benefit.
A society in which people are prosperous and happy is doing something
right; one in which they are poor and miserable needs to change.

Like many another adherent to the doctrine of natural rights,
Machan regards this kind of commonsense consequentialism as morally
unspeakable. Taking as axiomatic the proposition that humans everywhere
have certain abstract rights that are inalienable because conferred by
God or Nature, he is prepared to ignore the particulars of a
group's situation to focus exclusively on what he regards as the
individual's metaphysically free choice. That Spencer took a
different view, preferring moral principles adapted to the facts on the
ground rather than a priori presumption, leads Machan to complain that
Spencer abandoned moral principles and belief in human nature
altogether.

This objection is common, but it begs a large question and ignores
an important fact. The begged question is whether an eternally fixed set
of standards for conduct has been drawn up in heaven and written in the
book of nature, so that people can ascertain it a priori. That such
standards exist has never been proved, merely declared. So belief in
them may be ignored in a discussion that does not depend on unreasoning
faith. The fact overlooked is that we have no need for such uncritical
faith when a better justification is available. As more than one person
has pointed out, people usually flourish where certain tights--the right
to the fruits of one's own labor, for example--are valued and
protected. That fact constitutes a very good reason to regard these
rights as essential, making fifth wheels of a priori moral principles
and political faiths. (19)

Moreover, denying the reality of eternally fixed moral principles
should not be confused with denying the need for principles. Spencer did
the former, not the latter. On the contrary, his long-standing
preoccupation with moral and political questions grew out of his deep
and abiding conviction that having the right principles is important. He
simply happened to doubt whether practices good here and now will
necessarily be good there and then, when circumstances and people may
have changed. If Machan disagrees with this view, he ought to say why,
not simply dismiss the idea on the grounds that it contradicts his own
view.

Conclusion

Near the end of his essay, Machan says, "It seems to me that
no one need humble himself before another to such an extent that the
latter's theoretical problems are ignored in the process of paying
him homage" (1978, 18). That is true, but it is also true that an
author being introduced to new readers is entitled to have his views
presented accurately and sympathetically before being attacked. The two
volumes to which Machan has prefaced his criticisms encompass more than
1,100 pages of closely reasoned, profusely illustrated, and intelligent
thought on the fruits of a lifetime of learning. Those pages deserve
better treatment than summary dismissal of their main tenets. Herbert
Spencer may not always have given the right answers to the questions he
asked, but he asked good questions, and we still have much to learn from
the answers he gave. The Marxist left dismisses these answers on the
sole grounds that they disagree with preconceived dogma. Libertarians
ought not to imitate this group.

References

Baier, Kurt. 1964. The Moral Point of View. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.

Chisholm, Roderick M. 1989. Human Freedom and the Self. In On
Metaphysics, 5-15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Russell, Bertrand. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. New York:
Simon and Schuster.

Spencer, Herbert. 1981. The Man versus the State, with Six Essays
on Government, Society, and Freedom. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Richard Richards, Joe (and Doris)
Willingham, and a referee for this journal.

(1.) Chisholm (1989) also describes this ability, as "agent
causation."

(2.) Because it is not a reflex, it is done voluntarily; there is
an act of volition. Nevertheless, the thing is not done willingly, of
one's own free will. That kind of action occurs only when one
positively desires the result of one's action,

(3.) Of course, Augustine had another reason for his belief in free
will: he wanted a theologically satisfactory explanation for why men
must suffer for their sins, or transgressions against God's will.

(4.) See the chapter on Rousseau.

(5.) For a review, see Hocutt 2006.

(6.) For a clear-headed, spirited, and up-to-date discussion of
these issues, see Dennett 1984.

(7.) For further defense of egoism as I have defined it here, see
Hocutt 2000, 63-89. It will be said that my definition is idiosyncratic or unorthodox, but egoism is an ambiguous term of art that, within
limits, may be defined as seems best. By contrast, selfishness is a term
of ordinary language that we are not free to use or abuse as we please.

(8.) For illuminating discussion of the proposition, see Gauthier
1985.

(9.) A reissue of Sidgwick's seventh edition was published by
the University of Chicago in 1962 and reprinted by Hackett Publishing
Company of Indianapolis in 1981. A brief summary of Sidgwick's
discussion of the "ignobility" of egoistic hedonism appears on
page 199.

(10.) The point is developed in Baier 1964.

(11.) If the word had been available at the time, Spencer might
have better called his doctrine consequentialism, leaving the label
utilitarianism to Bentham and Mill. Their view is definitionally tied to
the idea of pleasure. Spencer, however, rarely talked of pleasure; his
interest was in policies that could be expected to achieve commendable
results--a wise choice. Pleasure is so ill-defined and evanescent a
notion that one does best to avoid it and, in speaking of behavior, to
refer to preferences and reinforcement.

(12.) For serious discussion of what Rand might have meant,
involving qualifications and explanations aplenty, see "A Dialogue
on Ayn Rand's Ethics" (2006). Besides Machan, participants
include Frank Bubb, Erick Mack, Douglas Rasmussen, Robert Bass, Chris
Cathcart, and Robert Campbell. Especially interesting is Campbell's
thesis that Rand had August Comte's enforced collectivism in mind
when she condemned altruism, using a term Comte invented. If Campbell is
right, Rand's view was both more reasonable and more consistent
with Spencer's than it appears to be. Unfortunately, as the endless
disputes over Rand's precise meaning amply confirm, her oracular
style makes it impossible to be sure what she thought she was saying.
Her lack of philosophical training and discipline are all too evident
here, along with her rhetorical genius. All we can say, then, is: if
Rand did mean enforced altruism rather than altruism sans phrase, she
should have said so. She should not have caused endless confusion by
condemning the general case when she meant only a specific case.

(13.) Whether this kind of social evolution is inevitable as well
as desirable is another question, though Spencer does not seem to have
clearly and consistently distinguished the two.

(14.) Compelling evidence for Spencer's hypothesis is the
well-confirmed fact that once food or a mate comes into an animal's
possession, the animal will resist attempts to take it away. In the case
of humans, uncontested possession soon gives rise to feelings of tight,
and violations of these strongly felt tights are viewed as a kind of
natural injustice.

(15.) He also thought it injurious to those who receive the loot,
anticipating by a century and a half the main thesis of Charles
Murray's Losing Ground (1984).

(16.) I believe Bentham eventually came to the same view. For
evidence, sec Hocutt 2005b.

(17.) For a more developed statement of this observation, see
Hocutt 2006, 452-54.